Re: Kurt Vonnegut Said It's the Apocalypse

Re: Kurt Vonnegut...

Hmm, let's see, he sells 250K copies (at probably $20-30 apiece), his popularity has never gone away, and he's a "rare literary figure who never stopped being cool." Well, at least, the reviewer isn't damning him with faint praise.

An "unimitative and inimitable social satirist" who uses terms like "very soon" and "by-and-by" to predict his "laughing prophet of doom" scenarios, he has the peak-oilsian mantra down to a t with phrases like "There is nothing they can do," and "It's over, my friend. The game is lost."

Unfortunately, people like Bush, Cheney, Rummy, and friends do (and probably will continue to) think up "things to do," and I, for one, would like to suggest that there just might be better alternatives if we could get off the dead center of blase cynicism and/or defeatist hand-wringing. :-))

And, by the way, Jeremiah was known as the weeping prophet, not the laughing one, though I suspect he might prefer today to laugh, because this is all so crazy-laughable. Well, as Simon & Garfunkel said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls -- and perhaps sometimes in best sellers. The original writing on the wall ( Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin) was the biblical author's way of saying "It's over -- the game is lost" and that the King was "lightweight" (and toast) which may be what the reviewer is trying to get around to saying about Vonnegut.

Since there seems to be no shortage of published writers, I assume that better ones than Vonnegut have, or will, come along. His son, Mark, wrote a pretty gripping tale about his own quest for meaning, excessive drug use, and eventual decision to become a doctor. The elder Vonnegut refers to his son, however, as "my son, the doctor" and not the writer -- indicating the conclusion that, after all, one's preference is what makes the ultimate determination of what one does or doesn't do. So, the bottom line, for Vonneguts or for the rest of us, remains "The choice is ours."

On 10/8/06, Dennis Brumm <brumm@brumm.com > wrote:

A "nice," dreary piece from August that I missed, though this is just a partial (hope you bought Rolling Stone to get the full bad news, as if most of us haven't heard this/don't already believe some/much of this). Interesting that it is "suddenly going to dry up." He needs Peak Oil 101:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11123162/kurt_vonnegut_says_this_is_the_end_of_the_world
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

"I'm Jeremiah, and I'm not talking about God being mad at us," novelist Kurt Vonnegut says with a straight face, gazing out the parlor windows of his Manhattan brownstone. "I'm talking about us killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline. What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. We've become far too dependent on hydrocarbons, and it's going to suddenly dry up. You talk about the gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We're crazy, going crazy, about petroleum. It's a drug like crack cocaine. Of course, the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world as the rapture. So I'm Jeremiah. It's going to have to stop. I'm sorry."

For the most part, this sort of apocalyptic attitude is to be expected from Vonnegut, who, after all, in his futuristic novel Cat's Cradle (1963) created Ice-Nine, a substance with the capacity to obliterate the Earth incrementally, like the "great door of heaven being closed softly." The naive protagonist of the novel -- a character named John/Jonah -- actually struggles to write a book titled The Day the World Ended. (Cat's Cradle also includes a hilarious faux religion known as Bokononism, whose religious texts carry the warning "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.") In the interview collection Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut, he even dismisses the notion that his fourteen novels, six essay collections and dozens of short stories have a long shelf life, saying, "Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by." Add to that doomsday scenario Vonnegut's notorious bouts of chronic depression, daily doldrums and suicidal longings, and you get a literary Cassandra of the first order.

Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about whether he saw Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. "I know what it's all about," he scoffed. "I don't need any more persuasion." Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. "There is nothing they can do," he bleakly answered. "It's over, my friend. The game is lost."

In the annals of American literature, Vonnegut has been categorized as a black-humorist -- a post-Hiroshima novelist who encouraged readers to laugh at the ghastly absurdity of the modern condition. More than any other fiction writer, Vonnegut has been unafraid to peer into the apocalyptic abyss of our lives. This is likely why, after five and a half years of the Bush administration, Vonnegut's signature bleak wit seems more relevant than ever. His most recent book, A Man Without a Country, a collection of essays, was a surprise best seller last year, spending more than eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and selling more than 250,000 copies. It would be simple enough to say that Vonnegut is having a major late-career resurgence, except for the fact that he never really went away. Vonnegut is that rare literary figure who never stopped being cool. Ever since he rose to prominence during the 1960s, Vonnegut -- with his Twainian mop of curly hair, bushy Bavarian beer-hall mustache and carbolic-acid smirk -- has been dubbed a prose shaman with a trick bag full of preposterous characters. Harper's deemed him an "unimitative and inimitable social satirist," and The New York Times anointed him the "laughing prophet of doom."

On this day, though, as Vonnegut sips coffee and his tiny white dog, Flour, yaps in the background, there is no wry amusement or social satire in his repertoire. There is only burning dissent about the way modern technology and global capitalism are usurping the last gasps of goodness from honest laborers' lives. And deep sadness that everyday humans are butchering their most civilized impulses. But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. "Oh, yes," he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?" "Lung cancer?" I offer.

"No. No. Because I'm eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn't work. Now I'm forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, 'Colon.'"....

(Get the full article in the current Rolling Stone, on newsstands until August 24th, 2006.)